Review: The Usual Suspects (1995)

Last night was our first official Flick Chicks get together! It's also been 4 weeks exactly since we created this blog. Exciting times! We had 2 films planned to watch, but due to a technical hitch and general chit chat, we only had time to watch 1. We chose wisely and went with a film near the top of the IMDB Top 250 list, The Usual Suspects.  Actually 'last night' was quite a while ago, but as usual I have delayed the publishing of this post!! I know, I know i'm terrible, but i always have the best intentions to 'add to this one on my lunch break' or 'type that up after work' which generally gets overrun by food or...no usually food!!  Anyway, back to it, quite pleased to be reviewing a film on the IMDB Top 250 list, if only to test out whether the hyperlinks work!! ;-)

Films are much more enjoyable when watched with company, and we had a great time watching this. I think Jenna will agree with me though that the first half an hour or so was really difficult to follow. We were both sat in front of the TV a little like this:

That was exactly my face to be fair!! We got our heads around it all in the end! Don't ask me to recall all of the main characters names though...

I think we felt a tad disappointed that we both worked out what the plot twist would be. We literally both had a lightbulb moment at exactly the same time! (I still think it was really obvious!) That said though, we both knew that this film had a massive plot twist, which is what made it so popular, so we spent the whole film trying to work out what it might be.  I did find it difficult to follow and to be honest if the ending hadn't been so good, I might have enjoyed this film a lot less! I think it is one of those films that is only good because of the ending, when you can go back and re-watch the whole film just to see if you missed any clues.  Although, not so much in this case as Allie mentioned we both had our lightbulb moments and clocked the twist very early on.  I was surprised actually because I asked my Dad who watched it years ago if he figured it out and he said he had no idea (and he's REALLY smart!!)

I get the feeling that Bryan Singer is going to be using a lot of these plot upon plot, twists, turns and confusion in my most anticipated film of the year X-Men: Days of Future Past.  Watching this has only made me want to see it more, to see what plot twists might come about.  Adding in the time travel element, my brain might actually explode ;-)

Even though we knew it was coming, the ending was fantastic. It actually made us laugh out loud! I'm really glad we watched this. Fully agree, plus very much enjoyed checking out the trivia on IMDB and rewinding (how very old fashioned of me!) the film to spot them, I think this will come to be a Flick Chicks tradition!  I wanted to give this a 9 but I think by losing grip of the plot in the early parts of the film, I lost a certain level of interest in the ending!